The subject matter described and/or illustrated herein relates generally to electrical connectors, and more particularly, to propagation delay compensation for an electrical connector.
In a traditional approach for interconnecting circuit boards, one circuit board serves as a back plane and the other as a daughter board. The back plane typically has a connector, commonly referred to as a header, that includes a plurality of signal pins or contacts which connect to conductive traces on the back plane. The daughter board connector, commonly referred to as a receptacle, also includes a plurality of contacts or pins. Typically, the receptacle is a right angle connector that interconnects the back plane with the daughter board so that signals can be routed therebetween. The right angle connector typically includes a mating face that receives the plurality of signal pins from the header on the back plane, and contacts that connect to the daughter board.
Some right angle connectors include a plurality of contact modules that are received in a housing. Each contact module includes a lead frame having a plurality of electrical terminals encased within a body. The terminals have typically been arranged in a single column within the body, or “in-column”. However, because each of the terminals within the single column has a different length, the time it takes an electrical signal to travel along each terminal, commonly referred to as propagation delay, is different. In some right angle connectors, adjacent terminals within the column are arranged as differential pairs. Because the two terminals within a differential pair are arranged in-column relative to each other, the two terminals within a differential pair have different propagation delays than each other. Some known contact modules have arranged the two terminals of each differential pair side-by-side, or “in-row”, such that the two terminals within a differential pair have the same length as each other. However, because the differential pairs of terminals are still arranged in-column relative to each other, each differential pair still has a different propagation delay than every other differential pair within the contact module.
A need remains for a right angle connector having a reduced propagation delay difference between different terminals of the connector. For example, a need remains for a right angle connector have a reduced propagation delay difference between different differential pairs within a column of terminals.